We took these photos on Saturday, in I., his hometown and our summer fantasy-dream, the place that turns, each year, to an early September morning nightmare, in which we see ourselves with our limbs cut and mouths paralysed, not being able to leave or scream for help, let alone move the slightest bit. Saturday was a perfectly serene and joyful day. My fingers from one hand only are too many to count this type of days (I should call them ‘events’, for that matter) I have per year. So I can’t say much about my perfect day, can I? It might really bore you, tell you nothing new and, furthermore, I might even start to doubt its immaculate memory – so I’ll leave it to rest, among other things that grow when I pay no attention to them whatsoever.

What I can tell you, still, is that yesterday was the exact opposite – and this might be the story you’d rather hear. It was one of those days, you know, when everything seems to go to crawl backwards and everyone overrides you and rips long and supple strings of sun burnt skin off your back, smiling and chatting and smelling and sniffing and spitting and gnawing their lips impatiently, looking for ways to dismantle you, to pile against you and drive you as near as you can recall to suffocation, putting their nauseous hands, reeking of squeezed tomatoes and salted cheese and cocky hoops of onion, next to yours – small and insignificant and dejected and dithering due to a suspicious amount of  natural energisers drank by their owner- on a sticky rail in a dirty, suffocating tram. I left the small town where stray dogs and retarded individuals (I mean that in an entirely clinical way, without a hint of smug depreciation) are a lot easier to come across than relatively normal people, expecting that my one-day encounter with the dusty whirlwind of the city (still a miniature version of a real city, still a bigger, sturdier and visibly more lodged place than I.) will be accompanied by loud fanfares and generous tides of lush ideas flowing from my tight-assed mind. Instead… I got myself the ugliest and most hurtful feet I’ve ever had, bruised in places I wouldn’t have imagined they could be, by a pair of pretty, deceptively innocent looking flatform espadrilles I had ordered from Asos not long ago, I got my stomach pregnant with a tiny and deceptively harmless looking sandwich, which doubled my waist and made my fitted floral denim skirt look ridiculous with a large tee tucked in the front and a pair of red ballet flats torturing some flesh covered by polka-dotted white socks, I got to be incredibly annoyed by too many teenage couples, tangled in infantile hugs at tram stops, bus stops, traffic light stops and basically everywhere they could stop and do what they do best – droop one against the other, suspended in spectral affections that won’t take more than a month to become the object of quitting their pretty little teenage heads into teddy bears and fluffy pillows, wetting their sheaths with more teddy bears and wide-eyed cats, then quickly jump into the same scenario with whoever they might get drunk with the next time they get to sneak out on their (f)rigid middle-aged parents. After much fighting and trying to keep my act together, after surviving a loooong bus ride home, trusting the best of my Ipod’s abilities to cover the loud ‘folk’ music, very ‘popular’ everywhere in this damn country ( I don’t have to drop the traumatic ‘m’ word, do I?), I finally got home. And those diamonds are never to be left next to so much dirt.

 

* Wearing thrifted Atmosphere dress, vintage bag, jewelry & sunglasses, the first pair of heels I ever fell in love with, bought about five years ago on a holiday in Nice. I might never wear these shoes again.